Teaching of animal breeding. What, when, where?

© 2015, Asociacion Interprofesional para el Desarrollo Agrario. All rights reserved. Until about twenty years ago, “classical” quantitative genetics was the core of Animal breeding, although the dramatic development of Molecular genetics and Genomics has made breeders to be incorporating this information to the theory of animal breeding and breeding programs. What do we need to teach our students and how temporality should be conducted? A first phase of the teaching is done in Agricultural Engineering and Veterinary schools. The time spent as well as the programs and orientation is highly variable between different universities. The goal is not to train specialists in animal breeding, but provide students with some basic ideas that allow them to function in their professional field. Training specialists in animal breeding needs of graduate studies. In Europe, several masters provide quality training and appropriate skills to work professionally in the field of breeding and initiate a doctoral thesis, although some American institutions extend the teaching to the doctoral period. The analysis of the structure of these masters and doctorates shows that in addition to quantitative genetics they incorporate knowledge in Genomics, Statistics and Programming oriented to the management of phenotypic, DNA chips and sequence databases.